by Baen Books
Within the Caineron barracks, someone shouted. More echoed him, the alarm spreading throughout the fabric of the compound.
A door set in one leaf of the outer gate opened, and a figure stepped out, clad in shabby black rags.
“Oh, Grimly,” it said. “What have you done to yourself?”
The wolver had flattened to the ground in his full furs. For one distracted moment, he was aware of the matted gray coat that barely covered his prominent ribs and concave stomach.
“You’re dead!” he croaked.
Torisen thought about this, silver eyes huge and puzzled in a wasted face. “I don’t think so,” he said, doubtfully.
Caineron were running down the street from both directions. Grimly rose, grabbed the Kencyr’s arm, and hustled him across the way into the protection of the gate leading to the abandoned Knorth compound.
The tumult within the Caineron barracks increased.
“What did you do?” Grimly demanded.
“I? Nothing.” Then Torisen added, as if as an afterthought, “Genjar is dead.”
“What? How?”
The other didn’t seem to hear him. He was shivering and the arm that Grimly felt through the tattered sleeve burned with fever. “It’s my fault,” he said, staring at nothing. “It’s all my fault.”
The wolver gripped him. “You need help,” he said. “The infirmary...”
“No!” With a quick movement, Torisen thrust his hands into his armpits and huddled over them. “I need Harn.”
“He’s alive too? Never mind. Come on.”
No one noticed them as they stumbled away from the barracks, across the inner ward, and into the office block set against the camp’s northern wall. Harn Grip-hard was in his quarters, issuing orders, a blood-stained bandage wrapped around his brow.
“Out,” he said to the crowd that surrounded him when over their heads he saw Grimly and Torisen in the doorway.
The room emptied, many glancing curiously at Torisen as they passed.
“Where have you been, boy?” Harn loomed over the new-comers, his haggard face like a bristly moon. “I told you to report to the surgeon.”
“I can’t. My hands...”
“Let me see.”
With surprising gentleness, he disengaged Torisen’s arms and held the latter’s hands in his own. Those slim, elegant fingers were swollen with infection and crisscrossed by a lacework of deep, angry burns, red and yellow and black.
“What happened?” Grimly blurted out, and Torisen answered as if dazed.
“The Karnids worship their god-prophet. They tried to convert me. ‘Do you recant...do you profess...’ I couldn’t. Our Three-faced God gives us no choice in such matters. ‘Then we must convince you, for your own good...’ They fit me with gloves of red-hot wire and I burned, I burned...”
He swayed in the wolver’s grip, horror dilating his eyes. “I-I can’t go to the infirmary. The surgeon will cut off my hands.”
“That’s as may be.” Harn scooped him up as one might a child. In the doorway, on the way out, he glanced back at Grimly. “Thank you.”
IV
More days passed. The camp shut in on itself and little that happened there reached the city above. Rumor said that only four had returned from the Host’s vanguard – Harn, Rowan, a Kendar named Burr, and Torisen. A fifth had been lost in the Wastes – Rose Iron-thorn. Grimly wondered about her young daughter, Brier. He also worried about Torisen. Were his hands healing? And why did he blame himself for the slaughter that had befallen the Host’s vanguard?
Caldane, Lord Caineron, arrived to claim the body of his favorite son. Grimly saw him ride through the streets of Kothifir, a frog-faced man in gaudy robes with death in his eyes. Nusair, a younger, less favored son, rode beside him and chattered, unheeded, in his ear. They took the lift-cage down the Escarpment to the camp. There the Caineron barracks swallowed them.
With his last coins, Grimly bought passage down to the camp and slunk about its streets, hungry for news. A whisper sent him to the Caineron compound where Harn Grip-hard had been called to account for the Urakarn disaster. How to get in? Stray dogs nosed about the gate, looking for scraps. Grimly dropped to all fours and threaded between them, twice as big as they, snapping whenever one drew near. He passed over the threshold on Harn’s heels. The big Kendar glanced down at him but said nothing.
They crossed the grassy quadrangle and entered the barracks proper. Here was the great hall with Caldane enthroned at its head in squat majesty, his son Nusair lounging beside him.
“So,” he said heavily, regarding Harn. “You were my son’s second in command. I have heard about you. A Knorth, were you not, before Ganth Graylord’s fall? You never supported my son Genjar as you should. He told me that. I also hear that you were struck senseless by a rock early in the battle and so had little to do with its conclusion.”
“Nonetheless,” growled Harn, flexing his big hands, “I take responsibility for all that happened under my command.”
“Of course you do, and so you are,” said Nusair with a smirk. “No one forgets that.”
His father glowered sideways at him and he shut up. Lord Caineron turned back to Harn.
“My understanding is that your...ah...clerk took charge after you fell. Perhaps it is to him that I should speak.”
“He is still recovering from wounds taken in the campaign...” Harn began, but the Caineron checked him.
“Nonetheless,” he said, “here he is.”
Two Kendar pushed to the front of the crowd, towering over Torisen whom they held captive between them. He was dressed better than when Grimly had last seen him, all in black as befit his nickname. However, his face still looked harrowed and white bandages covered his hands. Kencyr heal quickly. Clearly, Torisen had not, as if he hadn’t let himself.
“It’s my fault,” he had said. “It’s all my fault.”
“I’m done with you,” said Caldane to Harn. “Go.”
The big Kendar drew himself up, glowering. “I’ll wait for Blackie.”
“Do it outside.”
Harn glanced at Torisen and then, fleetingly, at Grimly. Stay with him, said his eyes. With that, he turned on his heel and left.
The guards released Torisen and he stepped forward, drawing his hands protectively behind his back.
“My lord,” he said, with a respectful but wary nod to Caldane.
The Caineron leaned back in his chair. “So,” he said. “You are the mysterious boy whom Lord Ardeth sent to join the Host. I thought I knew every Highborn in the Kencyrath. No doubt you are one of Adric’s bastards, eh? Perhaps of mixed or unclean lineage? That house is so proud of its pure bloodlines. I wonder how many freaks it keeps in its shadows. So you took it upon yourself to assume command of the vanguard, and no one challenged you. Odd, that, but never mind. What happened?”
Torisen gulped, silver eyes refocusing on memory.
“The vanguard was surrounded by Karnids,” he said. “Commandant Genjar had ignored the reports of his scouts as to the enemy strength, and there were many, many more of them than he had thought. They were destroying us. Harn ordered me to fight my way back to the main body of the Host to ask for reinforcements. Then he fell. A handful of us went, only to find that the rest of our forces were also heavily engaged. They might have held, but Genjar panicked and fled. The rest of the Host followed him, leaving the vanguard to Karnid mercy, of which there was none. They slaughtered all but a quarter of us, whom they took prisoner. Only five escaped Urakarn and one, Rose Iron-Thorn, was swallowed by sink-sand.” He gulped again. “I had to tell her daughter.”
“You’re lying!” Nusair burst out. “My brother never ran away! He was a hero!”
Caldane raised a hand to stop his son, although he too looked pale. “Perhaps this conversation is best conducted in private, and the truth pursued by other means of...er...persuasion. Nusair? Make your brother proud. The rest of you, leave.”
The crowd broke up, muttering, and Torisen w
as led away. Grimly tried to follow, but a forest of Kendar surrounded him. Those who noticed as he shouldered his way through their midst cursed and kicked him. With difficulty he restrained himself from snapping right and left with jaws that could have sheered through flesh and bone.
Here in a hallway the mob thinned, but where was Torisen?
Grimly ran back and forth, anxiously seeking his scent. It seemed to take forever before he found and followed it, up stair after stair to the Caineron guest quarters. Grimly reared up, placed his paws on the door, and pushed. When it opened a crack, he slipped through into the empty antechamber beyond. Nusair’s muffled voice sounded from an inner room. The next door stood open, but furniture blocked the view of its interior. Tapestries covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Grimly crept in behind them. If anyone had been paying attention, which they were not, they would have seen a large bump making its way around the edge of the room. It was very dusty behind the arras. Grimly struggled not to sneeze. Then he found a gap between panels and cautiously pushed his nose through it.
A massive oaken table occupied the center of the room, strewn with loose papers with more in a stack at one corner, held down by a chunk of granite. Nusair lounged behind the table in a thronelike chair, elbows on its armrests, fingers steepled before him. He seemed to be trying to imitate Lord Caineron’s ponderous manner, but the effect was marred by his petulant expression.
On the other side of the table stood Torisen in the grip of a large, silent Kendar.
“Father says that you are an Ardeth bastard. Did they keep you locked up in the cellar full of creepy-crawlies? Is that why no one ever heard of you before you showed up here and became Harn’s pet? Is it true that he favors little boys?”
When Torisen didn’t answer, Nusair shifted in his seat and gave a moue of discontent.
“Where’s the fun if you won’t play the game? You talked to Father. Why not to me? Let’s try this again. You said that my brother Genjar ran away from the Karnids. Of course he didn’t. Why did you lie?”
Torisen hissed through his teeth; the Kendar had twisted one arm up behind his back. Grimly, with difficulty, kept still.
“I know that there’s been talk,” said Nusair, again moving restlessly. “A strange way to commit suicide,’ they say... People can be so petty, so vindictive, and the dead can’t speak for themselves. At least his death was honorable.” His voice rose as Torisen looked away. “Well, wasn’t it?”
The Kendar twisted again. This time he had shifted his grip to Torisen’s bandaged right hand, and the boy cried out involuntarily in pain.
“Ah, your hands. Let’s see them.”
Encircling him with long arms, the Kendar grabbed the young Highborn’s wrists and held his hands out, flat to the table. Nusair stripped off the wrappings, then sat back. A curious expression, which he tried to hide, flickered across his face.
“You are a mess, aren’t you?” he said. “After all of this time, too. I wonder.” He picked up the granite paperweight and balanced it on his palm. “If I were to smash your fingers with this, would they split open like bad sausages? So I ask you again: what have you heard – what do you know – about my brother’s death?”
Torisen strained in the Kendar’s grip, but said nothing.
Nusair licked his lips and smiled. His eyes bright, he raised the stone.
Grimly charged out from between the arras, leaped onto the table, and skidded across its top with scrabbling claws amidst a storm of loose papers. Nusair went over backward in the chair with a yelp, his feet flying up. The wolver checked himself and sprang at the Kendar, Torisen ducking aside just in time. Grimly hit the big man on the chest and knocked him over. As he fell, he struck his head on the corner of a chest and, once down, lay still.
“Don’t move!” Grimly snarled at Nusair as the Caineron peered fearfully around the seat of the overturned chair behind which he cowered.
Resuming his half-human form, the wolver threw an arm around Torisen’s shoulders and helped him out of the room, out of the apartment. They had stumbled down two flights of stairs to the ground floor before the commotion began above. Grimly ducked under the steps, drawing the Highborn boy with him. Footsteps thundered overhead.
“This house certainly runs around a lot,” said Grimly in a whisper, “especially when you’re involved.”
Torisen was staring at his swollen, burnt hands. “My fault,” he muttered. “All my fault.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“The Karnid prophet said that he only wanted me. If I surrendered the vanguard, he promised that he would spare them. I did. He didn’t. They all died.”
Grimly gaped at him. “And you blame yourself? By stone and bone, Tori, you did the best you could. What more could you have done?”
What more than to avenge them? How had Genjar died? But now was not the time for such a question.
“Forget it,” Grimly said, distractedly waving a hand that was half a furry paw. “Forget it all and heal!”
Torisen looked up, confused. “What, heel, like a dog?”
“No, dammit. Would I of all folk say that to anyone? Heal!”
“Oh.” The boy’s face twisted. He began to laugh with an edge of hysteria.
Grimly was alarmed: what if someone heard? But he felt the urge to giggle himself. They spent a moment choking on helpless laughter in the dust of the stair well.
“When this is over,” said Torisen, wiping his streaming eyes with a cuff, “if it ever is, I would like you to sing for me. Something honest. Something true.”
Grimly felt a long-closed window open up in his soul, through which blew the fragrance of leaf and loam and deep, cool shadows.
“Not in Rendish, then,” he said. “A song of the Holt.”
The grassy quadrangle was momentarily empty. They stumbled across it and out the door into the street, where Harn Grip-hard strode across the sun-lit cobbles to meet them.
The Last Secret of Mary Bowser
by Steve White
After the Civil War, the United States government destroyed
all records of the espionage activities of Mary Elizabeth Bowser,
who had spied for the Union while a servant in the household
of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Thus there is very
little hard evidence of the details of her story.
But it is generally believed that in January, 1865, facing
imminent discovery, she fled from Richmond after an
unsuccessful attempt to burn down the Confederate White
House. Afterwards, she disappears from history. It is not
even known when or where she died...
The commotion grew fainter behind her as she hurried along Clay Street through the chill night. They must, she thought, have put out the fire. Her upbringing at the Quaker School for Negroes in Philadelphia did not permit her to curse.
Even if it had, she wasn’t sure she would have. At least not whole-heartedly.
She bore the Davis family no particular malice—certainly not the children. She had wept when five-year-old Joseph Evan had fallen to is death in April. And she had no desire to harm nine-year-old Margaret or her little brothers Jeff Jr. and William, much less the adorable toddler Winnie. But Thomas McNiven, the baker whose deliveries had been her means for relaying information, had been found out as a spy, and with suspicion certain to fall on her next, she had hardened her heart and done the one thing she could to cause disruption in the Rebel government before fleeing.
But she had failed. All that was left to her now was flight. She would somehow make her way north to Philadelphia, and her husband.
The thought of Wilson Bowser caused her concentration to wander for a moment as she turned right onto Eighth Street, and she barely managed to spot a pair of patrolmen in time to duck into the shadows before they could apprehend her for violating the Black Code by being abroad after curfew. Forced to remain motionless while they passed, she felt the cold bite in
to her. It brought home to her how much she needed help.
One place she could not turn to for it was the Van Lew mansion on Church Hill, where she had been born a slave. Elizabeth Van Lew, after her father’s death, had freed the family’s slaves. She herself owed Miss Van Lew her education as well as her freedom, for it was that spinsterish lady who had sent the young freed slave girl to Philadelphia, having recognized her potential. And now, even though her anti-slavery and anti-secession views were well known here in the Rebel capital, no one took Miss Van Lew seriously, for she was quite evidently cracked—“Crazy Bet,” everyone called her.
And all the while the harmless, dotty old maid was running a spy ring that included clerks in the Confederate government, guards at Libby Prison... and a certain former slave of hers, whom she had arranged to have employed in the household of the Confederacy’s First Family.
Being black, the new servant girl had been assumed to be illiterate. She had reinforced the impression by seeming slow-witted. Thus she had gone even more unnoticed than most servants. No one had thought to conceal confidential documents from her, any more than from a piece of furniture. And she had always had a phenomenal memory...
But now she could not contact Elizabeth Van Lew, lest she bring suspicion on her benefactress’ head and wreck her entire fragile structure of espionage. The uncovering of Thomas McNiven was bad enough. No; she must go nowhere near Church Hill.
But there was one place where she could, and would, go.
Even as she resumed walking, drawing her heavy shawl more tightly around her slender body against the January night, she smiled to herself as she reflected on the layers of secrets that comprised her life. There was, of course, the whole cloak of secrets under which she had lived her life in the Executive Mansion. Only Elizabeth Van Lew knew the truth about that... all the while never dreaming that there was yet another layer, of which she was as ignorant as Jefferson Davis was of the first one.